The question of public support for assisted suicide or euthanasia in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1972, the Canadian Criminal Code was revised so that suicide was no longer a punishable offense, but assisted suicide and euthanasia identified as punishable by law. Developments since then have lead to the question of whether or not the public is supportive of legalization. Few public surveys have been conducted in Canada or other countries. The University of Alberta's Population Research Laboratory was asked to add questions to their annual telephone survey. This survey is carefully conducted for results highly (95%) representative of persons aged 18+. In May–July 2010, 1203 Albertans were surveyed as expected. Data were obtained and descriptive-comparative tests completed. Amazingly, 77.3% of all responders said yes to the question: Should dying adults be able to get help from others to end their life early? Specifically: 36.8% said yes, every competent adult should have this right; 40.6% said yes, but it should be allowed only in certain cases or situations, 22.7% said no, and 6.2% gave no answer. Albertans did not differ in their support for hastened death by past experience caring for a dying person, having had a friend/family member pass away, where they lived, gender, marital status, income, ethnicity and voting preferences. Four sub-groups were not as supportive (although 50%+ were still in support): religious people, older adults, those without high school completion, and those without a living will. Albertans are surprisingly open to hastened death, with this information needing to be taken into consideration for future developments in advanced care planning and end-of-life care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".